passing more information into the widget

All Our Ideas is a tool for research, and we are constantly trying to enable richer data collection and analysis.  Therefore, we are proud to announce a new feature that makes it possible for you to “attach” information to each vote.  This should enable you to better understand who cares about what, and will greatly enhance the kind of analysis that you can do.

If you are using our widget feature, you can pass in a parameter which will get associated with each vote (and non-vote) that occurs through the widget, and this information will be appended to the data files that All Our Ideas generates for you.  For example, you would normally embed the widget using this code:

<iframe src=”http://widget.allourideas.org/[your_url]” width=500 height=450 frameborder=0 scrolling=”no”> </iframe>

but you can attached the word “hello” to all votes in the widget using this code:

<iframe src=”http://widget.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=hello” width=500 height=450 frameborder=0 scrolling=”no”> </iframe>

I can imagine two main ways to use this feature, but I’m sure that people will figure out other uses as well.

• With multiple widgets, you can record which votes are coming from which widgets. For example, imagine that you are embedding the widget on the front page and the discussion page of your group’s website. You can use different info parameters so that you could distinguish which votes came from which pages.
• If you already have a database with information about the possible voters, you can pass a user_id into the widget. This user_id would then allow you to link the votes to information about the voter.  For example, imagine that you run a non-profit that has a database with basic information (e.g., age and gender) for your 50,000 members.  You could e-mail each of these members a description of your idea marketplace along with a unique url.  When they visit your page you can capture the information from the url and pass into the widget.  Thus, you could associate the votes that people make with their demographic characteristics.  This added information about who the voters are would enable you to better understand the contours of public opinion in your constituency.  Here’s some sample javascript code (written by Luke) to help capture a user_id and pass it into the widget: https://gist.github.com/892396.

If you have questions, please post them below and we will answer them.